Boyle has urged Iran to sue the United States in the International Court of Justice to discourage a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and prevent the imposition of new sanctions by the U.N. Security Council. He offered to represent Iran and recommended that Iran begin drafting lawsuits for presentation to the International Court of Justice.
The seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 made the US, through its influence in the global stage, try to represent the act as illegal and refute it on grounds of international law. Thus, the US tried to show that the seizure of its embassy in Iran was against obvious international agreements. Regardless of what background the US has had in being compliant to international agreements, the present writing tries to investigate into the Iran hostage crisis from a legal standpoint in order to illuminate its historical aspects.
Boyle argues that Carter’s policies provide the very basis for the hostage taking. He says the US government is the number one side responsible for the hostage crisis by accepting the toppled Mohammad Reza Shah to the States.
The professor further says that the US accepted the shah for his so called medical treatment knowing very well that such policy will very likely lead to an attack on the US embassy in Tehran.
He adds that Carter’s justification of relying on then prime minister Mehdi Bazargan’s promise to protect the embassy is ill founded.
At that time it was very obvious that Bazargan did not hold enough sway on the government, let alone the various revolutionary groups that used to roam the streets of Tehran, Boyle says.
When the US president is in the first place the real contributor to the event, no legally deterrent force, or political or military for that matter, can prevent a huge crisis with other countries, he observes.
The toppled Iranian shah used to serve the West by violating many of the alleged human rights of the West, therefore, the West owed something to him, the professor goes on to add.
He says, "So far Carter’s decision was justified thus that we owed him, since the shah had proven that he was a reliable and good ally. On the outside, Carter made the decision based on a medical report by a White House physician and based on humanitarian concerns. The physician used to be in employment of David Rockefeller, then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank which used to have a lot of interest in having the shah healed. Carter’s argument violated a chain of fundamental tenets of the international human rights declaration (ratified by Tehran’s 1968 declaration). Carter failed, for the US interests had been provided, to pay attention to the shah’s role in peaking international oil prices in the OPEC. He also failed to notice how the shah had used the oil revenues to stage a military system much larger than what his security concerns had warranted. The shah did that to make a deterrence against the Persian Gulf states as a bully. Shah used to be encouraged by Nixon Doctrine, according to which the hirelings of the US should have helped the States in maintaining influence over areas of concern in the region and thus, bear some load of the burden of so called "peace.” The Shah meant to be the gendarme of the US in the Persian Gulf.”
Boyle then goes on to say that the long-lasting interference of the US in Iran’s internal affairs had provided more ground for the siege. The US should take a historical lessen that engaging in a full blown war with a government against a nation is not only unjust, but contrary to expediency as well.
The professor then tries to look at the issue from the standpoint of Iranian revolutionaries. Due to many bitter historical experiences of Iranians, their justifications about the hostage taking are noteworthy, he says.
The decision to accept the Shah conveyed to the Iranian Carter’s disregard for the prevailing situations in Iran. They had once expelled the shah before that, in 1953, but saw that the shah went back to his throne backed by the CIA.
"As a matter of sound constitutional policy, the US government should never carry out a large-scale deprivation of someone's civil liberties in the mistaken belief that this will permit it to achieve any foreign policy objectives. In the case of these Iranian students, vicarious retribution indicted upon a selected group of innocent aliens undermined the basic exercise of civil liberties by all Americans. Especially in times of severe international crises, rather than the simplistic rally-round-the-president phenomenon that this country has so tragically yet repeatedly witnessed, the exercise of civil liberties by citizens and aliens alike is essential to restrain governmental folly and illegality. Legislation should be enacted prohibiting the president from ever again selecring out a group of aliens peacefully residing in this country for purposes of political persecution or manipulation. Just as the United States has come to regret the internment of Japmese-Americans during the Second World War, someday America may hope for eventual repentance of its deportation of these innocent Iranian students.”
Boyle concludes by saying: According to these facts, it can be rightly and objectively argued that the arrest of US diplomats was in fact an upholding of the Iranian nation’s right to self defense according to Article 51 of the US charter. The defense, considering the times situations, should have had priority over articles 3 and 4 of part 2, and article 33 of the UN charter as well as over the 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic relations; not to mention the 1963 Vienna convention on consular relations.
